​How churches can embrace science: insights from scientist-Bishop Richard Cheetham

Most church leaders, inevitably, come from a background in the humanities. If not simply theology alone, pastors and ministers often have been educated in things like literature, history, law and the like before they entered ministry. But not all. 

Finding faith in science

Richard Cheetham, who retired as a bishop in the Church of England in 2022, first found a love for science as a teenager, just as he was embracing a living faith in Jesus. As he wrestled with complex physics and math, exposing the building blocks of the universe, an “obvious question” was how to relate this new understanding of the world with his nascent faith, he said. 

Later, he studied philosophy and physics at the University of Oxford so he could continue to explore in the lab and in the library at the same time, before going on to teach science at secondary school. His career led eventually to ordination into the Church of England as first a priest and then bishop, and decades later he ended up on sabbatical studying at a seminary in California. He gravitated towards a course on theology and the natural sciences, but what he learned there surprised him. 

“There’s a mountain of really good scholarship giving very deep understandings of the relationship between Christian faith and science,” Cheetham recalled. The problem was getting this out of the academy and into ordinary churches. “The challenge for someone like me as a bishop was not to add a little pebble somewhere to that mountain of scholarship, but how do we get all of this really good material much more widely spread in the churches?”

Spreading the word

It was this insight which helped give birth to the project which has dominated the second part of Cheetham’s ministry and continues in retirement. Equipping Christian Leaders in an Age of Science (ECLAS), which Cheetham co-leads, does what it says on the tin. It resources and trains vicars, pastors, and even bishops, on how to connect their faith with the deeply scientific era we all live in. 

Many Christians may respond that they personally have no interest, skills or overlap with science in their day to day lives, but Cheetham disagreed. “Even if you do not think you have a scientific bone in your body, your life will have been deeply affected by modern science, as well as some of the ways in which you see the world. So, the relationship between Christian faith and science and all that it gives us is an extremely important one to get right.”

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Debunking the myth of the conflict between science and religion

There is a common stereotype that science has been at war with religious faith since it emerged from the Enlightenment and Industrial Revolution a few centuries ago. Today, many presume that Christianity conflicts with science, and therefore any serious scientist, following the evidence and tenets of reason and experimentation, will end up in atheism. But Cheetham believes passionately this is a myth. 

“Both science and Christian faith in their different ways, I think, seek the truth about the deepest realities of our lives and our existence in this extraordinary cosmos in which we live. They are both truth-seeking activities.” In fact, when Christian leaders and scientists can get beyond the crude caricatures and build meaningful relationships, “you have very, very fruitful and interesting conversations”, Cheetham said. 

None of this is an especially new insight, he conceded, but it seemed a lesson each generation needed to learn again and again. He cited pioneering writing by Charles Coulson, a post-war mathematician and chemist at Oxford who was also a Methodist preacher, and more recent examples such as the late Tom McLeish from Durham University who helped lead ECLAS until his death last year. “They were saying you need a 3D approach to reality: you do not just look through a science lens and you do not simply just look through a Christian theology lens, but you make some attempts to have a conversation between them. And when you do that, what happens is you get a deeper understanding of both.”

Bringing Christian insights into the lab

There are undoubtedly prominent counterexamples, including of course the biologist and atheist doyen Richard Dawkins, but Cheetham said in his time visiting universities and labs many scientists were keen to discuss the spiritual, ethical, and even religious dimensions of their research. Whether it was cosmology or artificial intelligence, many bleeding-edge technologies and disciplines today have implications which reach far outside the realm of pure science. 

“There’s a real openness to that wider type of conversation that puts the scientific enterprise into a much broader context of human life. And I have certainly found we have had very, very good conversations because of that.” ECLAS focuses on bringing together scientists (Christians and non-believers) with church leaders so that their theology can be infused with the latest research and developments. But they are keen to drip-feed these insights to the grassroots as well, funding individual local churches to run Scientists in Congregations projects too. 

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Is our unscientific gospel too small?

With endless demands on their time and urgent ethical and missional challenges to overcome, how can engaging with science be pushed up the agenda for your average, busy pastor? Cheetham argues science can actually help in evangelism, especially in a society like the UK where young people are being raised in a worldview which presumes the church is an anti-progress, obscurantist sect. “Today’s generation are concerned about climate change in the environment, about the impact of artificial intelligence, about the impact of healthcare and vaccines, about the impact of agriculture and our food systems around the world,” the bishop noted. “And Christian faith has a lot to say in terms of how we approach those things.”

Part of the problem is that our gospel is just too small. Too many churches are stuck teaching and living out a narrow version of God’s story, Cheetham suggested. If you seriously engage in all of Scripture and bring it into dialogue with what he calls God’s Book of Nature, you see opportunities to express wonder and awe at creation, to think creatively about cosmology and the end times, to wrestle with evolution and the creation account in Genesis. 

The professionalisation of science in the 19^th century also had an unfortunate byproduct in dividing off scientists and theologians. Previously the two disciplines had been happily dipping into the same waters – indeed, science was originally called “natural philosophy”. As science developed and became more specialised and complex, this interdisciplinary approach declined, leaving most Christians today in the dark about what modern science is up to. 

This is what needs to change, Cheetham concludes. Areas as diverse as climate change and artificial intelligence, from the Large Hadron Collider to genetics, all touch on fundamentally Christian themes of identity, creation, personhood, revelation and salvation. It is vital to get scientific training and imagination baked into seminaries and theological colleges so that the new generation of Christian leaders were better equipped to bring the church and science back together again.

Tim Wyatt is a freelance journalist and co-host of Matters of Life & Death.